Doug Raber, a friend and former advisor of mine at both Tennessee and Missouri, is leaving academia to be the public library director in Ferndale, Michigan. The local paper there has the story.
Best of luck Doug, dress warmly. 🙂
Potentially headed back to Knoxville
I’ve applied for a job in Knoxville. No, I’m not going to tell you what it is, you think I want everybody applying for it? 🙂 It does tie in my web design skills and library background nicely and I hope I get the job.
I’ve tried the PhD thing twice now, once at UT and currently here at Missouri. It’s really not for me. But if nothing else comes along I’ll finish out my assistantship here and possibility even finish the PhD if I can keep myself motivated that long. But I’ve determined academic research isn’t for me, I’d rather be out there doing something.
Stephanie is applying for jobs both here in Missouri and at UT. So who gets a job where and when determines who moves back to Knoxville first. But we’ll both be in Knoxville eventually along with Lisa and all the critters.
Wish us luck. 🙂
St. Louis style pizza
One of the few things I like about Missouri is St. Louis style pizza from Imo’s. It’s a thin crust pizza that may not be for everybody but Stephanie and I like it a lot. We were just discussing today that we’ll miss Imo’s when we leave Missouri.
Well, it turns out that you can get all the ingredients needed to make Imo’s pizza or even frozen pizzas delivered to you by UPS. So we don’t have to leave Imo’s behind. Wonder how an Imo’s franchise would do in East Tennessee?
Weather and Sirens
I don’t like a state where they have to use sirens to warn you about the weather. We had some nasty weather last night and the tornado sirens went off twice. So we went and hid on the bathroom for a while. The dogs and the cat hid under the bed. I didn’t think I was very claustrophobic until being forced to shut myself in a bathroom for a while. Fun, Fun.
Snow
I’ve confirmed that Missouri is a Midwestern state and not Southern. One, nobody has a drawl around here (except me sometimes) and two, it’s cold. The temperature has been below freezing for a week and now there’s at least a couple inches of snow on the ground.
I like snow in the mountains were I can look out my window and say, “Yep they got snow in the mountains.” I also like the occasional dusting of snow to make things look wintery. Actual, laying on ground snow is not fun, especially now that I walk with crutches.
East Tennessee is supposed get this storm too, but there it’s 40 degrees instead of 16, so it will be mostly rain there. That I can live with.
Happy Monday
Well, let’s see. I drove by myself for the first time yesterday. It felt strange since I haven’t been my myself in a car for a long time. I just drove around the neighborhood. There wasn’t much traffic, although I did have to deal with stop signs and a traffic signal. It was pretty sloppy actually, my turns were to wide and my braking wasn’t that quick. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I haven’t found just the right seat position yet. I think I was a little too far away from the wheel.
In other news, I fixed a problem with my computer not starting Windows XP half the time. Turns out I just needed to update my video card drivers. Now if I could just make my computer shutdown and restart correctly I’d be happy.
I decided to update my iMac to OS X Tiger. As part of that I’m doing two things. One is finally burning an iMovie project that has been on the iMac for two years to DVD. But I have to wait for the blank DVD-R discs that I ordered to get here. Maybe they’ll show up tomorrow.
The second thing is I’m formatting the drive so I can do a clean install of Tiger. But I have 14 GB of 2770 songs on there that I don’t want to lose. So I ordered a 160GB OWC Mercury Elite external hard drive. That will give me plenty of room to back up the iMac hard drive (it’s only 60 GB) and room to store the next iMovie project that I forget about burning to DVD. 🙂 So this will be a busy week for the iMac.
I had a hard drive that I was going to use to back up the iMac already, but in the process on reformatting it for the Mac OS filesystem it died. It was an old drive that I had put in an enclosure, I hadn’t used the drive in almost 2 years anyway, so it’s no great loss. I’ve ordered a new hard drive for the enclosure so Stephanie can have a backup drive.
Well I’ll stop now, this post is getting a bit long. 🙂
Licenses and cards and stuff
Well Stephanie will be getting a new social security card in the mail soon. What they really wanted was the marriage license number which isn’t on the certificate itself, it’s on the receipt. Thanks for the tip Silvia. 🙂
Next week we’ll tackle new driver’s licenses and car license tags. Thankfully here in Missouri you can get them both at the same place.
If it’s not one thing
This has been a weird week so far. Yesterday we didn’t have any water. We didn’t think much of it at first, after all there is a lot of construction in our neighborhood and maybe somebody messed something up. So Stephanie calls the City of Columbia, who we thought we were paying for water. After we spent a lot of time on the speaker phone… turns out our house isn’t in the city water service area. We pay the city for sewer but not water, weird.
Anyway we found out who does provide our water and called them. Turns out the construction company that built the house was paying for our water until yesterday. Not that we knew this, we thought we had set up water service through the city. Anyway we got our water turned back on around 4:30 yesterday after a quick trip to the right office.
Today Stephanie was going to get a new social security card. However the social security office here in Columbia didn’t like our marriage certificate. They said it wasn’t official proof of a name change. So I emailed the Knox County Clerk and explained the problem. They said to find out what we need for an official document and they’ll send it. So we’ll see what happens I guess.
Misc. news from Missouri
Well we are now moved in to the house in Columbia, more or less. We’re slowly getting things unpacked, we’ll have more help with that this weekend when Stephanie’s parents get here,
We also now have a kitten named Mizzou. Keegan and Gracie seem to have fun playing with her.
And now for something completely different…. Farm Animal Friends…. be afraid. 🙂 Don’t worry it’s pretty funny.
Back in Columbia
Due to a shipping mixup, Stephanie and I moved all our stuff to Columbia a little sooner than we expected. Last Thursday I ordered two very nice Dell UltraSharp 1905FP 19 inch LCD monitors so I could give Stephanie my current monitors, a Dell UltraSharp 1900FP 19 inch LCD and a Viewsonic VE700 17 inch LCD.
Anyway the shipping estimate was 3+ weeks so I thought no problem, I’ll get them sent to Columbia, since we planned to move around July 8th. The next day I find out that my monitors have already shipped and are on their way to Columbia way ahead of the July 15th shipping estimate I got the day before.
So we need to get to Columbia and get there fast. We decided to go ahead and move all our stuff so we can be there when the monitors arrive. So we call everybody we know and start packing the house Friday night. By Sunday at noon all our stuff is packed in a 17 foot U-Haul truck and we are on the road. Roughly 10 hours later we pull into the house in Columbia.
Yesterday was spent unpacking the truck. Stephanie did 99.95 percent of the work, all I did was open and close doors. When you’re either using crutches or a wheelchair, moving large, heavy objects is pretty much not possible. But at least I did something. The unpacking was going to continue today, but Stephanie was worn out. So we hired some unloading help and they should be here later. The moral of this story is if a job looks too big for one person to handle, it probably is.
Tomorrow we will hop on a Greyhound bus for a ride back to Tennessee. After a few days there we’ll pack up the dogs in my car and head back to Columbia.